"The big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People donít realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior," says Valve's Gabe Newell as quoted on AllThingsD. "We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. Itís a hedging strategy. I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think weíll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If thatís true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality." Thanks VG247.

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Prez wrote on Jul 25, 2012, 18:47:I'm sorry but that is just not true. I got more blue screens in any week I ran Windows ME than I did in a year of using Win 98. ME was terrible compared to Win98; I don't even see how that's arguable.

Just because you lack the skill to set up a stable system does not mean ME stability was a global issue. My personal experience with ME was nearly flawless. I remember System Restore eating up resources like a starved piranha with a bleeding pig nearby but once that was turned off ME was a pleasure to play and work with. I had much less BSODs with ME than with 95A/B/98/98SE. Another neat improvement of ME (thanks to some of Win2K's kernel getting ported over and less 16-bit legacy crap than in Win 9x) was that you didn't have to reboot at least once every few hours to have a stable system. Win 98 was horrible in that regard. If you multitasked just a little then it was only a matter of when the system would crash and not if. Memory management was abysmal. If you were a "power user" then it was also guaranteed that you had to reinstall Win 98 at least once a year or so due to the registry becoming wonky beyond a certain age or usage.Win ME on the other hand was the first consumer Windows OS that at least somewhat resembled the reliability, stability and up-time that was normally to be found in enterprise environments at that time.

Needless to say that XP was another major improvement over the Win 9x era but I fully agree with that other dude in that ME is getting tons of undeserved bashing (and I'd bet real money that the most vocal negativity is coming from people who have never even had ME installed).

*cough*When ME was released I had to install it on many PC. I did support back then too. Driving to customers. ME was pure hell. Installing it and having it run in the first place was almost impossible, but then providing support for it... lol...It was HELL. Pure hell and we quickly abandoned it and went back to 98SE, which was rock stable compared to ME.